Naivete (in the Book of Proverbs) and Four Climate Joes (Manchin, Biden, Stalin, and the Plumber)

By Lowell Bliss

Director, Eden Vigil Institute for Adaptive Leadership & the Environment

Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who took more campaign cash from the oil and gas industry than any other senator, and who became a millionaire from his family coal business, independently blew up the Democratic Party’s legislative plans to fight climate change. The swing Democratic vote in an evenly divided Senate, Mr. Manchin led his party through months of tortured negotiations that collapsed on Thursday night, a yearlong wild goose chase that produced nothing as the Earth warms to dangerous levels (New York Times, July 15, 2022).[1] 

How could we be so naïve as to think that Manchin would have acted otherwise? But while we are at it: are we climate activists guilty of other naivetes: not only toward individuals, but in a failure to critique systems, in-a-vacuum postures, and loyalties and longings which abandoned us long ago?

Wisdom does not get much of a taxonomic treatment. I mean, it is compared to “knowledge,” as to its differences, but are there subsets of wisdom: categories or facets or shades of meaning? A verse like James 3:17 seems to suggest so. If there is “the wisdom that comes from heaven” is there, by implication, wisdom that comes from other places? And then for this wisdom to be “first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere,” suggests at least—count ‘em—eight approaches to parsing out wisdom.

Another approach is to come at wisdom from his opposite—which the Book of Proverbs seems to identify as “foolishness.” There are many categories of foolishness according to Proverbs. For example, the writer employs four different Hebrew words for “fool”: ‘ewil, kesil, nabal, and lets. The latter is most often translated “scoffer.” Therefore, is there an understanding of wisdom which could be understood as “non-scoffing”? (We’ll get back to this one.)

For the sake of our applying wisdom to how we relate to our four Climate Joes, I’m interested in the writer’s use of the Hebrew word pthiy, such as in a verse like Proverbs 19:7 where some translations render it as “the simple,” but others like NASB translate it as “the naïve”: “O naïve ones, understand prudence; And, O fools, understand wisdom.” Knowing what we know about poetic parallelism in Proverbs, we can hypothesize from 19:7 that naivete is a form of foolishness, and that prudence is a form of wisdom. And naivete is no cursory, easily excused form of foolishness. The writer rebukes it in Proverbs 1:22: “How long, you naïve ones, will you love simplistic thinking?” He prophesizes over the naïve’s end: “A prudent person sees evil and hides himself; But the naïve proceed, and pay the penalty” (Prov. 22:3, 27:12).

The naïve believes everything, But the sensible person considers his steps (Prov 14:15).

Judging again from poetic parallelism, it appears that prudence and sensibility are naivete’s English-language antonyms. Here are two definitions of the word “sensible,” both of which we so badly need in climate action: 1) “(of a statement or course of action) chosen in accordance with wisdom or prudence; likely to be of benefit; 2) (of an object) practical and functional rather than decorative.”[2] 

Naivete and individual interpretations

I first tripped over Joe Manchin in 2008 when I was immersed in the topic of Mountain Top Removal coal mining in Appalachia. Wise people—MTR activists like Allen Johnson (of Christians for the Mountains) or Marie Gunnoe or Larry Gibson—warned me about the man who was their governor at the time, Joe Manchin. How naïve I was to think that Manchin would change his thinking simply by moving to DC and joining the Democratic Caucus of “the greatest deliberative body in the world.” Gunnoe said as recently as January of this year: “Joe Manchin will absolutely throw humanity under the coal train without blinking an eye. My friends and I have a joke about his kind: They’d mine their momma’s grave for a buck.”[3]

Naivete regarding systemic interpretations

But what about Joe Biden, the victor over the man who withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement and who gutted the EPA? I had another wise activist friend who posted a meme about Biden on Inauguration Day in 2021: “Enjoy the last moment you won’t be disappointed with President Biden.” (Is my friend a lets, a scoffer?)

We should definitely examine our naivete toward the individual, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., but in this case, we should also admit the naivete that we bring in failing to make systemic interpretations. The exercise of effective adaptive leadership requires what the Kansas Leadership Center calls “the interpretative mind shift.”[4] Normally, we prefer to interpret the data (in our case: interacting with Manchin, Biden, Stalin, and the Plumber) with technical interpretations (where problems can be fixed with experts and money), benign interpretations (where we optimistically “think the best” of people and institutions), and individual interpretations (where we fire scapegoats and hire “the right people next time”). The interpretative mind shift for something like climate change begins with a recognition that global warming can’t be “solved” (whatever that means) and certainly not by money and expertise. Climate change is an adaptive challenge, not a technical one. The second mind shift is from benign interpretations to conflictual ones. Sometimes people are incompetent or evil. Sometimes reality is harsh. Sometimes goals have been rendered unattainable. In other contexts, this is called “having a courageous conversation.” Finally, there is the mind shift from individual interpretations to systemic ones. Yes, sometimes the problem lies with the individual, but other times the problem lies with the system. Sometimes an entrenched system is so powerful that it is—hello!—naïve to think that any other outcome is possible regardless of the individual who is in power.

For example, let’s imagine that a “better” climate candidate than Joe Biden had won the general election in 2020 (Bernie Sanders? Gov. Jay Inslee?). Let’s sweeten our imagination by giving that “perfect” individual two more compliant individuals in his party’s Senate majority (like what Biden is pleading voters for in 2022). Let’s further imbue him, as part of his perfection as president, with the legislative strength and finesse that historian Doris Kearns Goodwin ascribes to an LBJ. This president could really get things done for the climate, right?

Perhaps, but will the system let him? Will the Supreme Court, who just decided West Virginia v. EPA, let him? Will the Senate filibuster let him? (Keep thinking about systems, not individuals like Clarence Thomas or Mitch McConnell.) Will our two-party, every two- and four-year electoral cycle let him? Will capitalism let him? Will the Citizens United v. FEC and the amount of money in SuperPACs and campaign funds let him? Will inflationary fears let him?

Consider the tough spot that Biden found himself in back in April of this year, before WV v. EPA, before Manchin. Gas prices were escalating due to the war in the Ukraine, due to pandemic effects, due to inflationary pressures, due to any number of unknown (unknowable?) influences. Pressure was on Biden to lower prices and to open up domestic drilling. “He’s in pickle,” said Samantha Gross, a climate and energy fellow at the Brookings Institute. “His arguments [about reducing reliance on oil and gas] have had to change because of the changing conditions, and the situation has gotten a lot harder for him politically. … The politics were always going to be hard for him, but the level of difficulty just went way up. It’s a tough hand to play.”[5] David Kieve, the president of the advocacy arm of the Environmental Defense Fund, was okay with playing that hand. “If some of the short-term steps they’re taking to alleviate the pain Americans are feeling at the pump and how they’re feeling squeezed are the price we have to pay to get 50 votes in the U.S. Senate for a transformative clean energy deal, I think it’s a price worth paying,” Kieve said in April.[6] Fast forward to July 2022: no 50 votes in the Senate, no transformative clean energy deal, three months closer to the midterm elections. If climate politics is a matter of playing difficult hands, then this was a bad bet, a lost kitty, a gambling debt—but quite possibly, one that could not have been won even if we had had a more skillful player, as Gross and Kieve seem to hope. It seems naïve to think so. Instead, the game itself feels rigged against effective climate action.

Naivete and in-a-vacuum interpretations

I was standing outside a meeting at COP25 in Madrid when I leaned over to a colleague of mine who is the communications director for a major faith-based climate NGO. I asked him, “When are you going to give up on the 1.5 degree target?” He replied, “When the IPCC tells us that it is no longer achievable.” I was momentarily bolstered by his answer in a sort of Churchillian way, and I’m always ready to give the climate scientists their due, but then I thought: well, what about the political scientists, or the social scientists, or even the theologians (theology being once called “the queen of the sciences”)? What are those scientists telling us about the achievability of the Paris climate targets? At what point does a statement like “It still works on paper” come across as naïve?

There is another way of naively thinking about climate action in-a-vacuum. Let Vladimir Putin be our stand-in for Joseph Stalin, “Uncle Joe”, our once-and-former ally against the Nazis, who became one of our biggest threats for a nuclear winter. Putin was there in Paris at COP21. He said at the time that Russia considers “it fundamentally important that the new climate agreement be based on the principles of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and be legally binding, and that both developed and developing economies participate in its implementation. We proceed from the premise that it should be comprehensive, effective and equitable. We support the long-term goal of the new agreement to limit the rise in global temperature by the end of the 21st century to two degrees Celsius.”[7] But historical hatreds, imperial longings, and that habitual habit of war just seems to get in the way. It is naïve to think that the Paris Agreement can operate in a vacuum outside of global politics. In fact, one of the worst moments of the UNFCCC intersessional meetings last month in Bonn was when the Russian [climate] envoy in his [climate] address accused the Kyiv government of spreading “war and terror” across the Donbas and Ukraine. Some delegates walked out.[8] It’s naïve to think that substantive work can get done when missiles are flying.

 Naivete regarding our loyalties and longings

The plumber? Yes, you remember: Joe the Plumber, the icon introduced to us by the McCain-Palin presidential campaign in 2008. His real name is Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher from the Middle America Rust Belt. He normally votes Republican. He used to appear on Hannity; quite vocal about taxes, guns, and immigrants; includes God in the dedication of his autobiography.[9]  Let him stand in for all the Average Joes that we have working so hard to mobilize.

In 2017, after the big Climate March following Trump’s first 100 days in office, my colleagues invited me to stay on in Washington for two days of lobbying on Capitol Hill. I demurred: “I’ve come to the conclusion that it is naïve to think that citizen lobbying has any effect on my congressional delegation.” They knew where I was from at the time (Kansas, First Congressional District) and so politely excused me. Nonetheless, I turned around and invited them to stay two extra days in DC, on top of their lobbying plans, so that we could conduct a consultation together, attempting to understand where the creation care/climate movement was now that Donald Trump was the US president.

I set up four topics for discussion including one that I characterized as a thought experiment: “What would it look like if we ‘gave up’ on the Republican Party and white American evangelical Christians in our climate strategies, mobilization, and messaging? What would it look like to pursue our climate goals without putting our eggs in their baskets?” I reassured everyone that this was just a thought experiment; it was a “what if?” for a couple hours; it was just an imaginative exercise, that’s all. But the more I talked, the more the “deer in the headlights” look began to show up on the consultants’ faces. In the end, our group could not find it in themselves to engage my thought experiment. I get it. Some of them had the word “evangelical” in their organization name. Others were too heavily invested, including by donors, in hoping to mobilize Republicans.

I know Joe the Plumbers. I grew up with them. I am related to them. I was in their church. They sacrificially donated to me when I was a religious professional. I love them. Perhaps it is naïve to continue to think that Joe the Plumber can be mobilized for climate action more than what his population already is. That’s an individual interpretation, but also a systemic one, and a multivariant one.

If naivete is a dangerous form of foolishness, what is the opposite category of wisdom?

 Be prudent. Be sensible. Choose the “practical and functional” action over the merely “decorative.” Choose the action that is “likely to be of benefit.” That’s why the Kansas Leadership Center teaches the Interpretative Mind Shift—not that we might posture ourselves as cleverer-than-thou—but so that we might move from interpretations to interventions (actions) which have a stronger likelihood than other actions of being of benefit.

The danger of challenging the naivetes of the climate movement is that you will get labelled a scoffer, a lets. Have I just scoffed at the good, well-meaning, self-sacrificial, and ultimately triumphant efforts (“if we just persevere’) of the Paris Agreement, the UNFCCC, the Biden administration, American democracy, free market enterprise, or the millions of climate activists out there? While I had my dictionary open, I consulted a thesaurus and found the following antonyms of “scoffer”: believer, optimist, Christian, Jew, devotee, disciple.[10] Yikes! To be a scoffer is to be excommunicated.

Eminent climatologist Michael Mann uses a different word than “scoffer.” He might accuse me of being a “doomist.” I’ll take up that charge in future articles. I fear that Dr. Mann may be cutting us off from a crucial source of wisdom.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/15/climate/manchin-climate-change-democrats.html
[2] “Sensible,” Google Dictionary: Oxford Languages
[3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/joe-manchin-big-coal-west-virginia-1280922/
[4] Chris Green and Julia Fabris McBride, Teaching Leadership, Wichita, KS: KLC Press, 2015, 206.
[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/20/biden-climate-gas-prices/
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/20/biden-climate-gas-prices/
[7] https://unfccc.int/files/meetings/paris_nov_2015/application/pdf/cop21cmp11_leaders_event_russia.pdf (Google Translate)
[8] https://www.carbonbrief.org/bonn-climate-talks-key-outcomes-from-the-june-2022-un-climate-conference/
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_the_Plumber
[10] https://thesaurus.plus/antonyms/scoffer

An Interstellar Eco-Realism Punch to the Face

by Lowell Bliss

Long before Will Smith strode up to the stage of the Academy Awards to slap Chris Rock, there was Freya, at least in the pages of fiction. Freya didn’t just slap the moderator who was calling for more attempts at interstellar travel, she pummelled him. She climbed on top of him and kept throwing punches until she broke his nose. How dare he regard Planet Earth and her family and friends so lightly!

·      Definition of “will”: determination; an ability to continue on despite obstacles.

·      Definition of “smith”: as a verb-- to treat metal by heating, hammering, and forging it.

·      Meaning of “Chris”: Short form of Christopher, or ‘the bearer of the anointed one’

·      Meaning of “rock”: as slang--refers to Planet Earth, as in ‘Third Rock from the Sun.’

·      Who is Will Smith?: American actor who has appeared in nine science fiction films, over half of which involve a successful human determination to overcome obstacles posed by violent alien life forms.

·      Who is Chris Rock?: Comedian incidentally known for his jaded treatment of human vulnerability, in this case, the disease alopecia.

Who is Freya? Freya is the heroine in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2015 novel Aurora. She is part of the seventh generation of inhabitants of a starship sent out from Earth 160 years earlier in order to colonize a promising moon in the Tau Ceti system. (SPOILERS ALERT:). In the end, though travel at 10 percent of the speed of light allows them to finally arrive, they barely make it, and the first landing parties, while enamoured with possibilities of the new “home” which they call Aurora, soon encounter a strange pathogen in the mud which inflects and kills them all. Those who had not yet left the starship are faced with a decision. Do they try again on Aurora? Do they attempt to terraform a dead but nearby planet, much like the generations back on Earth were doing to Mars? Do they push off to another promising planet a few light years away where their great-grandchildren could test their luck? Then, there’s the fourth option: turn around and return to Earth. Freya is the leader of this group; they are called “the Backers.” If you are the type of reader who appreciates the mechanisms which make sci-fi plot lines plausible, then suffice it to say that it is the starship’s AI (developed by Freya’s mom) and hyper-hibernation (knowledge of this innovation which is communicated from Earth to the starship’s computers and human engineers) that allows Freya, as a main character, and 600 others of her generation to arrive back to Earth, a planet they’ve never known except in stories.

Freya and the starship are not necessarily welcomed back. Some on Earth fear a collision with the decelerating starship; others fear contamination; but still others don’t want any reminder of humanity’s abject failure. The flooded cities, disappeared beaches, and high CO2 content in the atmosphere are reminder enough, but interstellar travel and colonization was our absolution! See, there is always a “Planet B,” there is always an extra measure of human ingenuity! We can Elon Musk ourselves out of this mess! The Tau Ceti survivors are an indictment. Some people want to shoot the returning starship out of the skies.

Now back on Earth, Freya and a handful of her colleagues are invited to a conference held above the flooded streets of New York City. They are a little confused about the topic and during the first speaker, Freya leans in to Badim, her father, to ask “More starships?” Badim nods. The current plan is to send out many small starships to systems some 27 to 300 light-years away. The most self-satisfied speaker—“They are all men, all Causcasian, most bearded, all wearing jackets”—looks out over the audience and pronounces: “You see, we’ll keep trying until it works. It’s a kind of evolutionary pressure. We’ve known for a long time that Earth is humanity’s cradle, but you’re not supposed to stay in your cradle forever” (427).

Freya is triggered, but it is love that triggers her. She loved her mom, Devi, the brilliant engineer who kept a dying starship with its de-volving biomes (self-contained eco-systems) going just the few more light-years needed before arrival at Tau Ceti. Devi died of overwork.. Freya loved her friend Euan. He was one of the first to land on Aurora and one of the first to contract the bug. In his dying communication to Freya, he told her:

“What’s funny is anyone thinking it [interstellar colonization] would work in the first place. I mean it’s obvious any new place is going to be either alive or dead. If it’s alive it’s going to be poisonous, if it’s dead you’re going to have to work it up from scratch. I suppose that could work, but it might take about as long as it took Earth. Even if you’ve got the right bugs, even if you put machines to work it would take thousands of years. So what’s the point? Why do it at all? Why not be content with what you’ve got? Who were they, that they were so discontent? Who the f*** were they?” (178).

Freya loved her other friends who had died, including during their re-entry to Earth. In the end, in the final pages of the novel, as she goes swimming in the ocean for the first time, she seems to sense that she might fall in love with planet Earth herself. Certainly she wonders why the generations of Earthlings STILL seem not to love their own planet. Before she rises uneasily to her feet, hobbles to the stage, and beats this smug, bearded, jacketed interstellar visionary to a pulp, her old friend Aram addresses the audience. I quote him here in full, since he is speaking to you and to me in the year 2022:

“No starship voyage will work. This is an idea some of you have, which ignores the biological realities of the situation. We from Tau Ceti know this better than anyone. There are ecological, biological, sociological, and psychological problems that can never be solved to make this idea work. The physical problems of propulsion have captured your fancy, and perhaps these problems can be solved, but they are the easy ones. The biological problems cannot be solved. And no matter how much you want to ignore them, they will exist for the people you send out inside these vehicles.

“The bottom line is the biomes you can propel at the speeds needed to cross such great distances are too small to hold viable ecologies. The distances between here and any truly habitable planets are too great. And the differences between other planets and Earth are too great. Other planets are either alive or dead. Living planets are alive with their own indigenous life, and dead planets can’t be terraformed quickly enough for the colonizing population to survive the time in enclosure. Only a true Earth twin not yet occupied by life would allow this plan to work, and these may exist somewhere, the galaxy after all is big, but they are too far away from us. Viable planets, if they exist, are simply too—far—away.

Aram pauses for a moment to collect himself. Then he waves a hand and says more calmly, “That’s why you aren’t hearing from anyone out there. [cf. Fermi’s Paradox]. That’s why the great silence persists. There are many other living intelligences out there, no doubt, but they can’t leave their home planets any more than we can, because life is a planetary expression, and can only survive on its home planet”(428).

The moderator is undeterred: “There are really no physical impediments to moving out into the cosmos,” he avers. “So eventually it will happen, because we are going to keep trying. It’s an evolutionary urge, a biological imperative, something like reproduction itself. Possibly it may resemble something like a dandelion or a thistle releasing its seeds to the winds, so that most of the seeds will float away and die. But a certain percentage will take hold and grow. Even if it’s only one percent, that’s success! And that’s how it will be with us—” (429).

Smack! Or rather pow! Keep my [mother’s, friend’s, children’s, the seventh generation’s, planet Earth’s] name out of your f***ing mouth, or at least out of your dandelion metaphors.

The starship inhabitants, floating out around Tau Ceti, divided themselves up between Stayers and Backers, based on choice of destinations. Here as readers of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, we too are called to declare our allegiance, but defined according to our love. Do we want to STAY with the current paradigm of technological advancement, in love with our own ingenuity and our dreams of mastery over Nature? Or do we want to go back to a more elemental love? Love for people born and unborn, assigning actual faces and names to them. Love for the only planet that we will ever be able to call home? We have a will. We are smithies. We bear the Christ. We live on this rock. Euan cried out: “Who were they, that they were so discontent?”

Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora, New York: Orbit Books, 2015.

La La Land, Al Gore, and Climate Dream Weavers like You

by Lowell Bliss

This is an excerpt from an unpublished manuscript entitled “Climate Dreaming”, an excerpt from Chapter Two, “La La Land and the Nature of Dreams.”

If the theme of the movie musical La La Land is about the pursuit of one’s dreams, then the opening scene could not be more antithetical.  Everyone is in a traffic jam on a Los Angeles freeway.  They are literally going nowhere.   If you are someone who never takes off your climate glasses, you certainly took note that one of the main characters is driving a Prius, but I bet you could also almost smell the ozone from the exhaust of a thousand idling engines.  

At least they are all pointing in the same direction.  And at least each car radio is tuned to music channels, not talk radio—music, the language of dreams.  And at least one woman is using the delay to rehearse her dreams and is bold enough to share them in public.  All the music converges on her melody line and soon the whole freeway is singing, “Climb these hills/ I’m reaching for the heights/ and chasing all the lights that shine.”

Society-wide dreams are possible

La La Land was released in 2016 and is the creative work of writer/director Damien Chazelle and composer Justin Hurwitz.  It tells the story of Sebastian, a jazz musician played by Ryan Gosling, and Mia, an aspiring actress played by Emma Stone, who meet up in a modern day Los Angeles which according to the movie has lost none of its romance since the days of Bogart and Bacall.

The first truth that La La Land demonstrates is that there is such a thing as communal dreams.  Whole groups of unrelated people can suddenly share the same dream.  It’s comically unbelievable if you would wish to step back and parodize it, but it happens in every musical and we not only willingly believe it, we delight in it.  On the screen, we might see a street full of pedestrians.  Many of them are strangers to each other.  Cabbies and butchers, society dames and bankers are just walking along and then suddenly, they break out in song, they harmonize, they dance in a shared choreography.  The set might even shift behind them and open up onto something fantastical.   The scene might close as quickly as it does in La La Land with the slamming of car doors and the honking of horns, but the dream was real, it was shared, and it had its effect: it advanced the plot line.

When a musical number is shared by just two characters, like say by Seb and Mia, then the director is communicating that some sort of alignment is happening, maybe even what the poets call love or what the mystics call “the unitive way.”  During the planetarium scene, Seb and Mia start out dancing no differently than what they had done in a previous number.  Seb might be fantasizing that their dancing could render them lighter than air, but when he decides to lift Mia up as if to test the possibility, she responds and even takes over.  Soon they are waltzing across the galaxy.  She is not in his dream; he is not in hers.  They are sharing this dream together.  The same is true of the climactic moment.  Five years later, Mia is in the audience when Seb sits down at the piano.  It is an allusion to Humphrey Bogart’s famous line-- “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine”--and we should realize they are already living in the shared dream known as Casablanca.   Eternal love is possible even if the Lauren Bacall character must leave with Victor Lazlo and the Humphrey Bogart character must walk into the mist with his new pal Louie.   “Welcome to Seb’s,” Seb says, and then plays for Mia the composition he has been working on his entire life.   From the music emerges a new shared and alternative reality.  

In order to understand that there can be such things as communal dreams (or group dreams, or societal dreams), we don’t need to explicate the writing of Chazelle nor analyze the lyrics of Hurwitz and company.  It’s enough to say simply that any movie is an example of a group dream.  I was late to La La Land, missing it in the theaters.  I watched it on Netflix.  More than that, I watched it alone.  My family had driven down to New York City for the weekend where, for their mom’s birthday, my daughters had bought her tickets to a Broadway show.  Musicals, and the type of movies lionized in La La Land, are not meant to be watched alone.   We gather in a common space at a designated time.  There are people on all four sides of us, and perhaps one special person right next to us whose fingers creep questioningly toward our hand.   The lights dim, but we are still aware of human sounds nearby, some of which may be spurring us on, others perhaps annoying us, but always they keep us connected.  The dark lights simulate sleep, and the bright oversized screen at the front of the theater is an unmistakable promise: prepare to dream. 

Summer, Sunday nights
We’d sink into our seats
Right as they dimmed out all the lights
A Technicolor world
Made out of music and machine
It called me to be on that screen
And live inside each scene.

These dreams, while entering through our own individual photoreceptors and while interpreted through our own unique psyches, are nonetheless—and this is the point—group dreams.   For one two-hour block of time, everyone in that theater is having the same dream.  And if the movie is a box office smash, as La La Land was, then a whole nation or a whole planet of moviegoers can share the dream.  If the movie becomes iconic, as Casablanca has, then the dream is shared across generations, and even works its way, meta-style, into the dreams of characters like Seb and Mia.

An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s documentary, when it first came out in 2006 was a global dream about climate change, although most of us remember it as a nightmare.  Certainly by 2006, we had Roger Revelle’s charts, we had James Hansen’s testimony, we had Bill McKibben’s book The End of Nature, but Gore gave us images and narrative.  You may have forgotten the opening scene.  Here’s Gore’s narration:

You look at that river gently flowing by. You notice the leaves rustling with the wind. You hear the birds; you hear the tree frogs. In the distance you hear a cow. You feel the grass. The mud gives a little bit on the river bank. It’s quiet; it’s peaceful. And all of a sudden, it’s a gear shift inside you. And it’s like taking a deep breath and going, “Oh yeah, I forgot about this.”  

Eight sentences in and already the audience is mesmerized.  We are in a dreamlike state.  And then next, like Seb grasping Mia’s hand, Gore steps us up into the galaxy.  The next scene is the photograph known as “Earthrise,” the photo taken by Apollo 8 astronauts on Christmas Eve of all days!  Gore narrates:

And they lost radio contact when they went around to the dark side of the moon and there was inevitably some suspense. Then when they came back in radio contact they looked up and snapped this picture and it became known as Earth Rise. And that one picture exploded in the consciousness of the human kind. It led to dramatic changes. Within 18 months of this picture the modern environmental movement had begun. 

A single photograph becomes a global dream.  A single documentary does the same thing.  Group dreams are possible, and the argument of this entire book is that a new group dream for a positive climate future is necessary, and you can contribute to it, but only if you are willing to exercise leadership as a dream weaver.

Society-wide dreams require someone exercising leadership

The second thing that La La Land teaches us is that group dreams require leadership.   They don’t happen spontaneously.  A young woman must be brave enough to step out of her car and establish the theme and melody line for all the stranded motorists.    In an early scene, Mia and Seb are walking around the Warner Bros. lot.  She is discouraged by her failed auditions.   “Should have been a lawyer,” she sighs.

“Because the world needs more lawyers,” Seb rejoins sarcastically.

“It doesn’t need more actresses.”

Understanding how wrong she is becomes Mia’s unique character trajectory.   The world does need more actresses, so long as they are actresses like her aunt, the kind who jump barefoot into the Seine, the kind who take young nieces under their care.  The world needs more actresses so long as those actresses are willing to lead us in shared dreams.  At Mia’s big audition, as she sings “Here’s to the ones who dream. . .,” she finally realizes:

A bit of madness is key
To give us new colors to see
Who knows where it will lead us?
And that’s why they need us

 So bring on the rebels 
The ripples from pebbles
The painters, and poets, and plays

Bring them on!  Does the world of the Paris Agreement need more lawyers?  No, it needs more painters, and poets, and plays.  Prior to 2006, Al Gore was more lawyer than he was actor.  One year later he wins an Academy Award for his dream leadership.  Admittedly, it was the leadership of producers Laurie Bender and Lawrence Bender and director Davis Guggenheim who crafted Gore’s slide show poetically, but where would we be if Al Gore—who had never been known to stray too far from his head—had not found his heart, if he had not been willing to vulnerably tell stories of his Tennessee childhood, the loss of his sister to tobacco, or the loss of his dreams to George W. Bush?

Martin Luther King stood before 250,000 people and declared, “I have a dream.”  He used the first person singular pronoun, but if it wasn’t leadership he was exercising, then a person standing on the edge of the Reflecting Pool might have simply murmured, “Yes, Reverend, you do, and I congratulate you on its beauty.”   Instead this listener likely responded, “Yes, we do.  We do have a dream; I was afraid we didn’t.”

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

We didn’t join hands, as much as have them joined together by a remarkable leader: Dr. King with his words and imagery grabbing one wrist, grabbing another’s, and joining warring hands together.  And it’s clear on the video of the March on Washington, and based on the black church experience of call-and-response, that though Rev. King may have started out alone saying “Free at last!” the crowd was together with him and each other by the end: “Free at last!  Thank God Almighty, we are free at last,” the mighty crowd called out.

Shared dreams require someone to exercise leadership, and we may be tempted to lament that dream weavers of Martin Luther King’s or Al Gore’s or Emma Stone’s or Pope Francis’s caliber are in short supply.   That is where you and I often make a mistake that is fatal to progress on the climate challenge.  I am a certified teacher of the Kansas Leadership Center framework, and two of the five Principles we expound are: “Leadership is an activity; not a position” and “Anyone can lead any time anywhere.”   It’s true of the story of An Inconvenient Truth.  Here was a man who all his life was immersed in positional leadership: senator’s son, congressman, senator himself, Vice President of the United States.  And yet, Al Gore won his share in a Nobel Peace Prize for work done after having famously been elbowed out of positional leadership.  It was his wife who exercised leadership by saying to him in his grief, “Why don’t you dust off your old slideshow?”   In La La Land, there are any number of positional leaders: the boss who fires Seb for not playing Christmas tunes, the band leaders (including John Legend’s character) who insist on Seb’s conformity, the coffee shop manager who doesn’t care if Mia has scheduled an audition.  But the movie is also replete with anyone leading anytime anywhere—and most of these acts of leadership have nothing to do with telling someone else what to do.  Seb’s sister tries that early on, and Seb just tosses her suggestion—a phone number of someone to call—onto the floor.  Most of the other acts of leadership, by contrast, build a shared dream.  For example, in the scene where Mia returns to her house after a particularly disappointing audition, her roommates want Mia to join them at a party.  She begs off.  “I’ve got to work,” she says.   They don’t force a dress on Mia nor drag her out to the car.  Instead, they spin a dream for Mia to share in: 

Someone in the crowd could be the one you need to know
The someone who could lift you off the ground
Someone in the crowd could take you where you wanna go

By the end, Mia isn’t simply going along with them; she’s driving the car.  A shared dream for a positive climate future is possible, but it is going to require numerous acts of leadership by numerous unsuspecting leaders.  

Greta and I: Confessions of a Fifteen Second Cameo

by Lowell Bliss

It’s impossible for me to write a review of the new Greta Thunberg documentary because, you see, I appear in it.  At the 30:26 mark in the film, at a break in the action during the COP24 climate summit in Katowice, Poland, you suddenly hear my voice and my fifteen second cameo begins.  I have more lines in the movie than Arnold Schwarzenegger or Pope Francis. The narcissist in me demands co-star status, as if the title of the film, I Am Greta, is misnamed, but the long-practiced documentary watcher in me knows that I am a co-star, as are all the other adults who appear in the movie, as are you and every other adult on this warming planet.

A major theme of I Am Greta is how adults first encounter Greta Thunberg and then respond to her, and then whether we seriously listen to her or not.  At the 30:26 mark, as I have my encounter with Greta, I come across pretty good, I think, but by the 1:09:27 mark, when the young, increasingly-frustrated activist says, “We have not taken to the streets so that you can take selfies with us and to tell us that you really admire what we do,” I think that, had I been in a theatre at my first viewing, I would be scrunching down in my seat and searching for my sunglasses.  I might be a co-star, but I am not the hero.

The COP24 climate summit in Katowice, Poland was something of a debutante ball for the 15-year-old Miss Thunberg.   Her lone, and then small-scale, school strikes outside the parliament building in Stockholm, Sweden had garnered enough media attention to warrant an invitation from the UNFCCC, the UN climate secretariat.  “We need a person who could speak for, [who could] deliver a message from today’s younger generation,” a Swedish-speaking official says over the phone.  In other words, Greta was not yet famous.  By the next climate summit, a year later in Madrid, it was impossible to get into the room with her, unless you arrived early.  In Katowice however, I could go up to her while she was waiting around for her dad.  She had just finished participating on a panel of youth activists in a half-full press room, and I could ask her: “May I get a selfie?”  The rest of my lines, caught on film unbeknownst to me, are: “I have a 16-year-old daughter in America—actually in Canada now, we live in Canada.  Anyway, she’s quite the activist too.”  The selfie now complete, I turn and smile at Greta, “But anyway, we’re proud of you,” I say to her.  End of cameo.

I heard about the clip in a text message from a friend who lives in Hawaii.  Ayesha and her husband had been watching the film on Hulu when she did a double take and said, “Wait.  I think that’s Lowell!”  My wife, the aforementioned daughter (now 18) and I spent about an hour texting back and forth with Ayesha while figuring out that the film was not yet generally available in Canada.  My brother-in-law however subscribes to Crave and could watch the film, but the price of his sending the 15 second recording on his phone was to kid me about not knowing where I lived.  COP24 was in December 2018; we had moved to Ontario from Kansas that previous August.  

My first thought about the cameo in I Am Greta was admittedly, “That’s so cool.”  And it is, thank you very much.  But because I love watching documentaries, my second thought was more analytical: why in the world would the director (Nathan Grossman) decide, from all the footage that he had collected, to include those 15 seconds of my encounter with Greta?  And why would he insert that clip there where he did?  What purpose did my encounter serve in advancing the storyline or the themes of I Am Greta?  Answers to those questions would best serve my fellow co-stars in Greta’s story, meaning: you.  I could offer up to my readers more than a self-indulgent blog post.   Here’s my list of theories of what purpose my clip serves:

• Immediately before my clip, Greta’s father Svante is talking with Swedish reporters.  “I can tell she’s feeling good,” he says.  “She’s laughing.  Which is amazing.  You can’t know that ahead of time.  I didn’t know how she’d react.”  He explains that, growing up, his daughter had selective mutism.  She had gotten depressed, stayed home from school for a year, and didn’t speak to anyone but her immediate family for about three years.  Then my voice pops in—“May I get a selfie?”—and the filmmaker can “show; don’t tell” that Greta is interacting just fine with strangers and the world. 

• Svante is a dad speaking of his 15-year-old daughter.  I am immediately juxtaposed to him, not to Greta, as another dad proud of his own 16-year-old daughter.

• Immediately after my clip, Greta and Svante are walking down the hallway.  “It’s like a movie,” she says to her dad in Swedish, with a chuckle.  “Suddenly, lots of paparazzi.”  I am that paparazzi, the first of many in her life, because the pair then lapse into irony when Greta says, “It’ll be over soon; it’s a fleeting thing,” and Svante replies, “Right, soon it’ll be Monday, and no one recognizes you anymore. No one will know who you are.”

• How far out into the context am I allowed to theorize?  The next clip after the hallway scene is of Greta and Svante talking on FaceTime to her mom, little sister, and dogs back in Sweden.   Greta’s homesickness will become acute by the end of the movie.  Did I help set the scene by referring to my own loved one back home, somewhere in North America?

• And then the next scene after the FaceTime scene—in other words, the third clip out beyond mine—is of other young climate activists “back home” and around the world, each of them inspired by Greta. Like my daughter Bronwynn, they all happen to be female.

• My furthest reach into the context goes all the way back to the opening credits where against a black screen you hear a disembodied voice say, “A little bit of warming wouldn’t be a bad thing for myself being a Canadian, and the people in Russia wouldn’t mind a couple degrees warmer either.”  And then you hear the recognizable voice of the American president: “What’s with all this global warming?  A lot of it is a hoax.  It’s a hoax.”  I’m glad that 30 minutes later, Canada and the US could be better represented: “but anyway, we’re proud of you, [Greta].”

It’s possible that the director got a lot of narrative and thematic mileage out of my cameo.  In the end though, just like a mere 15 second segment gets lost in a whole one-hour-forty-minute film, so my one little encounter gets lost in the larger themes of the movie, one of which is the superficiality of how adults respond to Greta Thunberg, her school strikes, and the youth climate movement that she has inspired.   I fare better at the hands of the director than does the adult assistant in the UK House of Commons who, half-an-hour after my clip, appears with Greta: “May I take a selfie?  Here we go. . . one, two, three.”  What immediately follows is Greta staring out a train window and her voiced-over monologue: “Everyone says it is so lovely that you are here, and promise to improve, but never do.   When I’m in these fancy environments, or these palaces, or castles, or whatever it is, I feel very uncomfortable.  It feels like everyone is in this role-playing game, just pretending.  It feels kind of fake.  Sometimes it feels like it doesn’t matter how many of us go on strike.  What matters is that the emissions have to be reduced, and it has to start now.” 

I also fare better at the hands of the director than the adult who appears with her iPhone on the pier at Plymouth from where Greta and Svante will embark on a trans-Atlantic voyage by boat to the UN Climate Summit in New York, to the conclusion of the remarkable twelve months that is the time frame of this documentary.  This adult positively gushes: “The whole world thinks you are wonderful.  You’re a brave girl.”  She didn’t say anything essentially different than my earlier encouraging words, but her misfortune is that her cameo is the first “photo op” that the director includes after Greta’s speech to the UK House of Commons, and Greta’s line about “we have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us”:

Is my microphone on? Is the microphone really on? Is my English OK? Because I’m beginning to wonder. You lied to us.  You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. 

During the last six months I have travelled around Europe for hundreds of hours in trains, electric cars and buses, repeating these life-changing words over and over again. But no one seems to be talking about it, and nothing has changed. Despite all the beautiful words and promises, the emissions are still rising.

We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and tell us that you really admire what we do. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.

I fare better but only because I appear earlier.  Yet, I have tried to imagine Greta in the current day, over in Stockholm, watching the premiere of her biographical documentary.  She reaches the 30:26 mark and hears someone from off the screen ask, “May I get a selfie?”  She remembers Poland, but doesn’t remember this particular moment.  She does not recall this man with his Clic reading glasses hanging off his neck, with his daughter off in America or Canada.  In the moment of Greta watching her own movie in 2020, I don’t “appear earlier” to her at all.  I appear “after the fact,” after thousands of such selfie requests, after the 2018-2019 season where she heard many more “beautiful words,” where she was told repeatedly that we adults admire what she and her young colleagues are doing.  I appear after carbon emissions have continued to rise, after 2018, 2019, and 2020 have joined the list of the hottest years on record. 

The first words out of Greta’s mouth after the opening credits are: “Adults always say one thing and then do something completely different. They say we only have one planet and we should take care of it, yet no one gives a damn about the climate crisis.”  The first encounter that Greta has with an adult in the film, immediately after this statement, is a white-haired lady who wanders by where Greta sits by herself in front of the Swedish parliament building.  “Why are you on strike?  You have to go to school,” she tells Greta, towering over the child who sits on the pavement.  Greta explains, and the adult walks away with a dismissive hand wave. “Meh,” she says.  I bet she regrets her cameo, but not as much as I hope Jean-Claude Juncker regrets his.  Juncker was the president of the European Commission when Greta and some of her newfound Belgian friends give a speech before the EU Parliament.  Greta concludes her remarks, sits down in the front row and is handed a set of headphones in order to hear the translation of Juncker’s response.  He acknowledges “Monsieur president, Ladies and gentlemen, participants” and “Dear Greta” and then says—I kid you not—“And now I am going to focus on what is happening here today.  I changed things while trying to regulate smaller things.  Now in terms of flushes, they said that we need to harmonize all flushes across all toilets in Europe.  Well, it could be useful, because we save a very large amount of energy.”   Greta removes her headphones.  The camera switches to her young friend across the aisle.  She too removes her headphones.  Those two single gestures were enough to gut me.  My throat caught.  Tears came to my eyes.

Vladimir Putin makes an appearance in the film and dismisses Greta as naïve.  Donald Trump mentions Greta’s name at a campaign rally, rolls his eyes, and elicits a chorus of boos.  Jair Bolsonaro calls her “this brat.”  Alan Jones of Sky News Australia says to all school strikers, “you're selfish, badly educated, virtue-signalling little turds.” Such footage isn’t hard to obtain, but this documentary is certainly not just another example of that genre which should be called “climate denial porn.”  None of those people are going to bother to watch this film.  But I would watch it, and so would you.  We are the Greta admirers.  We are the encouragers of young activists.  We are ones who “get it,” who don’t say “Meh” and walk away.  This movie is for us, which means that the challenge of I Am Greta is reserved for us as well.  Are we doing enough? 

Certainly, one story arc in the documentary is Greta’s growing disillusionment with whether adults are listening.  At one point, there is a real threat that Greta will devolve back into depression, into selective mutism, into refusing to eat.  Her parents worry about her.  The other story arc, the obvious one, is the growing youth movement.  In the opening scene, she sits alone.  Within four minutes, the first young person joins her: “May I sit with you?”  Then another.   By the 6:21 mark, there are eight kids surrounding her at the parliament building.  By the end of the film, with depictions of the global climate strike in September 2019, Greta is “surrounded” by seven million people.  It is a thrilling and hopeful sight to see.   Nonetheless, Greta said one more thing to the UK Parliament: “People always tell me and the other millions of school strikers that we should be proud of ourselves for what we have accomplished. But the only thing that we need to look at is the emission curve. And I’m sorry, but it’s still rising. That curve is the only thing we should look at.”

Greta Thunberg has Asperger’s.  I have not mentioned that previously, but you’ve known about it, haven’t you?  It figures into the film.  Anyway, Greta’s Asperger’s, we are told, allows her to laser-focus on what really matters.  She can look past the crowd of paparazzi, she can ignore the palaces and the castles, she can joke about the awkward photo of her dad with the Pope, but she can also be ruthlessly honest about a crowd of seven million mobilized activists.   “The only thing that we need to look at is the emission curve.”  So, I’m sorry, ego-stroked Mr. Bliss, and I’m sorry, you, my fellow co-stars in Greta’s movie: are we doing enough? The curve is the only thing we should look at, and I’m sorry, but it’s still rising.

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I Am Greta (2020, directed by Nathan Grossman) is streaming on Hulu, and available for rental on YouTube, and possibly other outlets by now.

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The article that I originally wrote about my encounter with Greta in Poland, December 2018, is entitled “Greta Thunberg Has a Dad” and is available here.

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I hope to generate one more blog post as a review of I Am Greta. I want to re-examine the activist’s seeming need to suffer for their activism, much like how photographer James Balog “sacrificed” his knees in the documentary Chasing Ice.  (I told you I watch a lot of documentaries.)  By way of preview, my treatment of Balog can be found in the article “‘By Balog’s knees. . . ‘ we will overcome climate change” and is available here.

COVID-19 and the Unemployed Climate Activist

by Lowell Bliss

The Harris Poll conducted a survey last December which reports that “American adults said climate change was the number one issue facing society.”   This was encouraging news for us exhausted climate activists as we deboarded our planes from Madrid, just returning from the failed COP25 climate summit, contemplating a crucial COP26 scheduled for November 2020 when the Paris Climate Agreement would go into full effect.  We had a lot of work to do in the next twelve months, but it was nice to know that so many Americans shared our concern.  We would be employed (in all the best meanings of that word.)

Then COVID-19 happened.   COP26 got postponed for an entire year.  Activist events—like the Stop the Money Pipeline protest, April 26—were cancelled altogether.  Most of us were pretty much used to working from home anyway, except maybe not with having school-aged kids underfoot during office hours. Our annual budgets were generally covered, so missed paychecks weren’t an immediate threat.  Nonetheless, we are mission driven.  Our workplace is the gathering, the conversation, the face-to-face exchange of human energy.  Our raison d’etre is an incarnated love embedded in actual eco-systems.  In other words, cyberspace can have avatars, but not incarnations.  Zoom is not the biosphere.  Most importantly of all, our currency is focussed attention, concern and compassion—and here’s where the latest Harris Poll has some troubling news.

In an article yesterday describing an exclusive poll for Fortune Magazine, Harris Poll CEO Will Johnson asks:

“Battered by pandemic and economic collapse, do Americans have the capacity to care about the environment? Not so much, judging by a national poll we just conducted.”

From December, climate change has dropped to second to last on a list of a dozen concerns facing society.  (It remains ahead of only overpopulation, a perennial loser on these polls, as is.) COVID-19 and the recession are of course the top concerns which have re-ordered priorities.  The poll itself has not yet been released in detail—Fortune, I suppose, who paid for the poll is in control of what and when to release—but I imagine that following the George Floyd killing, racism has also raced to the top of America’s attention.  What is most startingly from the poll however is that these three huge concerns didn’t simply nudge climate change down a few spots into fourth place.  No, instead, climate change was shoved; it has plummeted down to next-to-last place.  Johnson himself admits: “I was personally surprised and discouraged to discover that our devotion to the world around us is flagging.”

That our devotion to the world around us is flagging is just one interpretation.  As with any data, multiple interpretations are possible, including the one that wonders whether the Harris Poll is faulty.[i]  In the next few days, in small installments, I want to explore various interpretations of this poll, such as how society seems to have limited capacity to handle “end of the world” scenarios anyway, and how listing things and prioritizing things (and debating those prioritizations) are just one of the ways we seek to control the uncontrollable.  Today however, I simply want to explore a personal revelation: namely, that this may help explain why I have been feeling like I’m part of the COVID-related unemployment statistics, even though I am not.

At the beginning of the pandemic in Canada, my oldest daughter lost her job at a florist shop and moved in with us for the duration of the stay-at-home orders.  I’ve had other friends and family members who have been furloughed, who have been offered early retirement, who no longer find their small business viable, or who just plain don’t have a job to return to.  My son graduated from Teachers College last week, and while he has returned to a landscaping gig he’s had, it runs out in October, and meanwhile he wonders whether a local school district will hire him for the fall semester.  Meanwhile, in the US, Congress and the White House duke it about added unemployment benefits.  Nonetheless, as any unemployed person can tell you, the paycheck is only one piece of the puzzle.  Florists, teachers, restaurateurs, university profs—we are all, to various degrees, mission driven.    We want to make a contribution to a better world.  What happens when that opportunity is taken away from us?

Since March, I don’t feel like I’ve had many “goods and services” to deliver to our “economy” as a climate activist.  (I’m using business terms here.) Sure, I’ve written a blog post or two, I’ve kept some associations alive through Zoom meetings and small joint projects (one of which involved helping choose a new logo for an Anglican climate justice group.)  At the beginning of the shut down, I tried taking a different tack—namely to consciously put my climate activism on hold and respond to the immediate crisis by volunteering for pandemic-related work: I developed and facilitated a quick response consultation program for global health workers, but we had only four clients during the three months of my commitment; I filled out a volunteer profile on a Canadian government website, but since I lacked the qualifications of a health care professional or a contact tracer, no one called me back.   Two weeks ago, I felt so low that I wrote this poem:

Punching the Clock During a Pandemic

Some mornings,
I climb the stairs to my office,
Sit down at my computer,
And pretend to work.
Actually, what I pretend is that my work makes a contribution,
That it makes a difference.

That’s not every morning. It’s some mornings. Truth be told, in the months of June and July, it was many mornings, particularly when Ontario was re-opening into Stages Two and Three, but I found no commensurate re-opening in my vision, my ministry, my work life, my soul. The Harris Poll suggests that I’ve lost my customer base (to continue to speak in business terms.)  And I don’t blame my constituency or my target market.  Climate change proceeds apace. It even generated some big headlines recently:

·      Canada’s last intact ice shelf collapses due to warming.

·      2020 may be the world’s warmest year on record, even without an El Niño

·      NOAA’s new hurricane outlook shows so many storms, we may have to turn to the Greek alphabet

·      Kiribati's president's plans to raise islands in fight against sea-level rise

But admittedly, when I encounter these headlines in my news feed, I still find myself gravitating first to Dr. Fauci’s latest report about the coronavirus every time.  In other words, I could write something about climate change, but if my readers are anything like me nowadays, I’m not sure they would ever get around to reading it.  I’m not sure they necessary should.  In other words, I bless the attention that the world is giving to the pandemic, the recession, and to systemic racism.  

 But regardless of how “unemployed” I might feel as a climate activist, I do have some decisions to make, because as the climate change headlines indicate, climate change is not slowing down.  I am still mission driven. I must still work in faithful gratitude for my ministry donors (of which my pay check is only one basis for my gratitude). The work of the moment is to figure out how to do effective climate activism in this new context, and the first step it seems to me is to realize that ours is not a new context at all. Ask any biologist who has studied bats, any epidemiologists who has studied viruses. . . Ask any unemployed coal miner who has feared eviction from his house. . . Ask any survivor of lynchings, oppressions, and systemic racism. . . The context for creation care hasn’t changed since in the beginning, when we were told by our Creator God to bless and flourish, till and keep, subdue and rule in godly stewardship. The context never really changes. I’m the one who needs to change.

Coming Next: “Tell Prioritization: ‘You, Go to Hol-ism!”

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[i] One interpretation is that this Harris Poll is faulty.  Harris Poll, formerly Harris Insight and Analytics, has been around since 1963 and generally receives good on-line reviews.  In terms of their political polling, FiveThirtyEight gives it a “C” grade with a +1.3 Mean Reverted Bias toward Republicans.  Since Harris Poll and Fortune have yet to release the current poll and describe its methodology, we are only given statements like this from Johnson: “We asked a panel of U.S. adults a series of questions about today’s most crucial issues, environmental policy options, and their own behavior.” As for Fortune magazine, one media bias website writes: “While Fortune does not always have a favorable view of President Trump, they always have a favorable view of business interests and limited government. When it comes to science, Fortune supports the consensus of scientists on issues such as climate change.”